January 2009 Archives
Something I'm working on.
I was reading Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius when I started writing this story.I do that sometimes; I start reading a book and get totally inspired to sit down and write a story similar to the one I’ve just read. After reading a bunch of Michael Ondaatje, I wrote a story about Maggie Gillwood, a war widow living in Ottawa, coming to terms with rebuilding her life after the death of her husband, and the farmhand she hires who instantly falls in love with her. Echoes of Ondaatje reverberate through the writing, with metaphors of cinnamon and brief flashes of the past. I even included a Michael Ondaatje quote as an epigraph:
Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.Sure, it was a moody piece, with lines like
- Michael Ondaatje
oh, how he’d get himself worked up when hisand an almost unforgivable scene with a prison guard weeping softly over his captive prisoner’s fate - “a small mark on a dusty floor the only evidence of compassion.” But it had promise and some imagery I really liked. I agonized over the story for months, tweaking this line and that until I ran out of steam. It ended up a weird hybrid of blank verse and prose, never really deciding on one or the other. And besides, I was young - what did I know about life, especially about the loss of a spouse? It’s probably for the best that I left that particular story alone.
team was doing poorly, screaming obscenities
at the helpless wooden cabinet
he was passion.
After reading Neuromancer for the umpteenth time while I was working for a network security company, I wrote >_, a story about a hacker. I was feeling the high of having worked for a network security company, and being so close to actual hackers. The unnamed protagonist of the story was doing time in an accounting firm writing a small worm. He runs into an especially boastful accountant who leads him to Chase Strand (can’t you just feel the Gibson dripping from that name?), a reclusive but über-wealthy former hacker.
Unlike Maggie, which was moodily quiet, even sullen, >_ was brash and loud, trying to combine the styles of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. I had some good plans for that story, with some impressive plot twists. I enjoyed writing it, but never really got around to finishing it. Like Maggie, the story just petered out, plot sputtering to a slow, rolling stop.
I stopped writing fiction when I started writing technical documentation. Something about writing procedures and conceptual documents stripped me of the ability to write for enjoyment. By the time I left that job, I’d even stopped blogging regularly, the joy of writing had traveled so far away from me.
So I guess what I’m trying to say here is bear with me. Having read something inspiring, I’ve decided to start writing a story that will likely fizzle out after a couple of weeks. But I’ll have fun doing it, and really, isn’t that the point?
I am a normal person to whom abnormal things sometimes happen. It started when I was 4, learning to ride my green Schwinn with training wheels. Dad was working the garden of their little house on Merlin Drive - a choice of homes that might have contributed to my lifelong love of all things wizard - when God yelled at me. I can’t remember what he yelled, perhaps he was mad at me for venturing down to the ravine behind our house, which I wasn’t allowed to play in. But it scared the Hell into me, and I ran into the house. It occurred to me years later that it wasn’t, in fact, God who yelled at me, but rather it was the CF-101 Voodoos flying overhead as part of the annual airshow in my home town.
The abnormalities continued through a childhood fascination with extraterrestrials and conspiracy theory. I remember vivid dreams of a giant moon outside our kitchen window, and opening the door onto our patio to a 3-foot-tall slug-like alien. I spent much of my adolescence convinced that not only were aliens real, but they were living just on the edge of my existence. Alongside the aliens lived the ghosts and creepy things that go bump in the night. For my 12th birthday, my parents bought me a copy of Mysteries of the Unexplained, a book that still haunts my bookshelf. I lay awake wondering if tonight was going to be the night a little grey face appeared in my window, or if I was going to spontaneously combust.
You couldn’t keep me away from the paranormal. I sucked back books about ghostly possessions and cryptozoology, memorizing facts about the Loch Ness monster and Ogopogo. I knew the different types of UFOs and the difference between telekinesis and telepathy.
I was an odd kid.
It may have had some effect on my popularity in school. See, I was never really that popular. I was socially awkward, never feeling all that comfortable around other kids and not sure how I should interact with them. I talked about weird things, gravitated towards the other social outcasts and malcontents, and had weird interests like computers (it was the late 80s). I was an easy target for bullies and they knew it. I know now that nobody had it easy growing up, and even then I knew there were kids that had it a lot worse than me. I was lucky enough to have a relatively stable family with a decent enough income; I wasn’t incredibly ugly or plagued with acne and only worked because I wanted to buy my own computer and car.
But this isn’t so much a story about my childhood, though I’m sure we’ll take some unavoidable side trips there. This is a story of abnormal things. I used to collect them, these little tchotchkes of absurdity. Like >_ and Maggie, their chronicling was inspired by something I was reading at the time, Harvey Pekar’s American Splendour. Pekar was an oddity in the comic world when he first started writing. He didn’t write about superheroes, teens in Riverdale or little rich kids. No, Harvey Pekar made comics about the mundanities of every day life in working class Cleveland, Ohio. He didn’t even bother with the artwork, trusting it to a different artist every issue. I loved it, and saw the potential to do something very similar with the people I ran into in Edmonton.
Thoughts on the iPod touch
K ended up getting me an iPod touch for Christmas this year (which she has since dubbed the stepford wife). Of course, I'd been going on and on for months about how much I wanted one... ever since the iphone came out really.
Now that I've had it a few weeks, I thought I'd write down a few thoughts about it.
Typing
I'm a big fan of the typing correction included in the touch OS. Although I'm getting better at typing on this thing, I'm not 100% there yet. I was never a big SMS person, so I never got used to typing with one finger. I don't mind the lack of tactile response at all - I'd type just as poorly on a blackberry.
Cut & paste would me nice, but in truth there has only been one or two occassions where I really needed it and couldn't get around it another way.
App selection
One of my initial concerns with iPod apps is that they'd end up creating the same giant collection of crap that the palm ecosystem created. I'm a bit sad to say that they did. Although there are many good apps out there, there's a tonne of garbage too. Granted, I've avoided the pay apps, since I don't want to start getting into those.
Battery life
I can't complain at all about the battery life, since I basically use this as a small, more portable version of my laptop. The laptop only gets four hours of battery life - the touch lasts pretty much a full day.
Again no complaints, really. About the only comment I have is that it would be nice to have a unified inbox instead of separate inboxes for each account.
Browsing
So nice, especially since I've experienced the suckage that is cellphone browsing. The only time I dislike the experience is when the site reverts to a mobile version (I'm looking at you food network).
So overall, I'm loving it. One of these days I might grab the iPhone SDK and build an app of my own.
Hi! I'm a blogger!
It's no secret that I haven't been all that visible here over the last year or so. I've been averaging one or two posts a month and haven't really been all that focused on updating the content of this site. There's a couple reasons why:I just haven't had much to blog about, especially since I have self-censored the things I put on this site, and I just haven't had the energy to blog what I can let myself blog about. Does that make much sense?
It's ironic for someone who positions themselves as a blog scholar that they'd shy away from posting to their blog, and I can't say exactly why it is I might be doing so. I just don't have an urge to communicate through the blog, even though I have stuff that I could talk about. Like work, where we're working on some really interesting projects and I'm feeling like I'm exactly where I need (and want) to be. And some interesting stuff has come up with those projects as well, such as the work I'm doing with Moodle and Elgg. Of course, maybe it's only interesting to me, and there's aspects that I can't (or probably shouldn't) talk about in order to maintain some distance from the more sensitive parts of the job.
Part of the problem is that I don't have a clear idea of what I want to do with this site or this blog in general. I'm not freelancing on a regular basis as I have in the past, so there's no real need to maintain a professional site (though I do still have the studio page up just in case). But I don't want to keep a personal blog, since K isn't comfortable with me talking about her online -- which makes perfect sense, given that she is a public figure as an instructor, and has to have control over her online presence -- and I'm not comfortable with sharing my life online as much as I have in the past. Never mind the fact that my life just isn't all that interesting lately, especially with K living in BC -- there's just not much to write about, unless you want stories about how I spend my evenings watching old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and avoiding looking at the basement or the kitchen (or the dining room and upstairs office, which have piles of stuff from downstairs in them).
There is some interesting stuff I'm learning in my job that I want to share though, like my last entry about code reviewing and project management. I'd also like to share some of the things I've been looking at outside of work as well, like a topic I suggested to Dr. Martha Nell-Smith for inclusion in a panel at Digital Humanities 2009 on using social networking tools to better promote and increase usage of digital humanities tools (and likewise, a paper I've submitted to Digital Humanities Quarterly railing against how the tool makers haven taken over the field and need to move aside and let the humanists in to play).
Another part of the problem is that I know that most of the readers of this blog, the few that there were, have gone away because it's been so long since there was any compelling content here. The people that I would want to keep in touch with through the blog I already keep in touch with via other means, such as IM, email, or Facebook. So I'm not writing anything for them. Of course, there's no other audience. I haven't built a strong online persona that would bring people to the site, and the work that I do has more of a local, offline influence (funny, since I not only work for an online university, but also research online culture).
Were I to go back to my thesis on online identity, I'd say that the audience isn't necessarily important; the blog could be used as a mirror for my own identity to help me work thoughts out. But then we get back to not wanting to share my life online, especially where it intersects with K's life.
The end result is that I just can't visualize who my audience is, or would be, and that leaves me in a sticky position as to what to write here. If you're still reading this site, what are your thoughts? Do you still blog (I know a couple of you do), and if so what/why? What would you want to read here? What have I written in the past that has caught your interest and made you want to come back (I assume it's been a long while since there's been something of interest).
Code reviews
Ive been thinking quite a bit about the development process lately. There have been a couple projects I've been following at work that haven't gone exactly as I'd like them to; the developers were left to their own devices, and little guidance was given to their work.
One method I'd like to put in place for a couple of these developers is to strengthen the project scaffolding around their work. The projects they were working on had little or no rrquirements; those that were defined were weak and ill-defined, and weren't given great importance by the developers. We've been trying to put a more effective project documentation process in place, especially in departments outside of our own that have been running a bit loose. It's funny though - if you had told me three years ago that I'd be enforcing a project management process of m own free will, I'd have definitely looked at you funny. The benefit of it has definitely come clear to me though, and I can't imagine running a project without it now.
A big part of the problem is that these are junior developers placed in senior positions - they really should be paired with a senior developer. Of course, resources being what they are, that's not always feasible.
So how do I ensure these developers are successful in their work? The solution that occurs to me is to have their work go through a peer review process. This means that before their work can go to testing or production, it needs to be read and critiqued by developer.
Overall I think the code review process is a valuable one, and not just for junior developers. Senior developers can benefit as well. Indeed one of the most important activities for a developer of any experience level is to keep working. Having someone comment on your code and suggest more efficient / standard / new ways of doing things can be extremely beneficial.
What do you think? Is a code review a valuable exercise? Can you think of other peer activities developers should be engaging in?